Luggable dream

I had a dream this morning.  Unusually, when I woke up from the dream, I remembered the dream.  Even more exceptionally, in my case, what I could remember of the dream kind of made sense.  It was about ordinary things, as far as I can remember, and it wasn't totally bizarre.

What I can remember of the dream related to the old luggable computers.  Those of you who are as old, or almost as old, as I am, and worked with technology in those dim and distant days, may remember these suitcase sized "portable" computers.  Originally most of them ran on the CP/M operating system, and later versions ran on PC or MS-DOS.  Most of them had dual five and a quarter inch floppy disks for storage.

As I was waking up from the dream, but still in that fuzzy half state where you're not fully into the current world, I was thinking that these machines would have been in a bit of difficulty these days, since it's hard to get five and a quarter inch floppy disks anymore.

Actually, it's pretty much impossible to get five and a quarter inch floppy disk *drives* anymore.  I don't think that they're making five and a quarter inch drives anymore, and, unlike the three and a half inch floppy disks, nobody ever made, or sold commercially, a 5 and 1/4 in floppy drive with a USB adapter.  Somewhere around here, in my much reduced tech junk pile (or piles), I probably still have a three and a half inch floppy drive with a USB connector.  It has, of course, been a long time since anybody sold a computer with either three and a half, or five and a quarter inch, floppy drives actually installed.

I actually had, and was very proud of, one of the relatively rare Canadian made luggable computers.  It was a Canadian made, and physically exceptionally well designed, Hyperion computer.  Dual floppy drives, of course, and a rather beautiful machine in terms of its ergonomics and overall design.  It did have one fatal flaw: the read only memory, the basic programming that ran everything else, was only designed for PC/MS-DOS version 1.0.  That meant that there was absolutely no possibility of ever installing a hard drive in one of these machines.

(It, along with so much other technology that I had hoped to donate to a computer museum one of these days, went in the mass furor and clear out as Gloria was dying [and slightly before we actually knew that Gloria was dying], while the girls were throwing me out of the townhouse, and moving me to Delta.  There were $120,000 worth of, primarily technical, books that went in that clear out, and more than a couple of trunks full of old computers, old laptops, various kinds of boards, and a whole bunch of ancient technology.)

And, speaking of ancient technology, and five and a quarter inch floppy disks, it reminded me of all kinds of ancient storage media, a lot of which went in that clear out.  As well as a whole bunch of three and a half inch discs, and 5 1/4 inch discs, a whole bunch of eight inch floppy disks went.  There were also various formats of tape storage, including some nine track tape reels.  I never actually worked with punch cards, but I did have an opportunity to play with them at one point, and so there were a bunch of punch cards that went, as well.  I didn't still have any, but I do remember doing some educational programming with twelve inch laser video discs.  (As far as I can recall, the total storage capacity of video on those twelve inch discs was about thirty minutes of video.)  All kinds of storage, all kinds of memory, all kinds of files and information.  All lost, like tears in the rain.

And the dream reminded me not only to write down the thoughts about storage, and ancient storage, and luggable computers, and ancient technologies, but also about multi-factor authentication, and also about my dead phone.  And I was awakened out of the dream at four in the morning, and I've got all these ideas swirling around and have to get them down or I'll never get to sleep, so I guess I'm up for the day.